I’ve been building PCs for 20 years — trust me, buy a gaming laptop instead

[Looming Dementia]

Agreed with the other commenters. Suggesting expensive gaming laptops because of self induced problems seems dubious. How does one fix a laptop? Break out the soldering iron and have at it? Why not suggest prebuilts instead? They just work out of the box, the same with laptops while maintaining the possibility to fix and upgrade. If you don't need the portability of a laptop, then it's probably not a good fit.

Yeah, there are good reasons to go with a gaming laptop. The issue in this article isn't one of them. It's a reason to go with a pre-built but not a laptop.

An RTX 4080 (real version) will blow an RTX 4090 (laptop) out of the water. And you'll pay 50% more for the laptop.

I put together good pre-builts, myself. With My current desktop, I went with an Alienware machine. I got a great deal at a time it was hard to find parts. Nothing wrong with pre-built, when you can find a whole machine on sale, which you could get for MAYBE $100 less if you search for parts on sale for months.

Pre-builts yes, but pre-built desktops, not laptops.

 

[Ryan F Mercer]

The PC market, industry, and culture, do not seem to be in a good place right now.

I had a 13 year old tower that I finally decided to replace just as the pandemic chip shortage began. I managed to get my hands on a decent motherboard and CPU, but didn't make it under the door to buy a GPU at a reasonable price, so I waited a year and a half. The rig worked great all that time, but the moment I got my hands on a 6800xt, that's when the problem started. I kept getting weird audio, glitchy video, stuttering mouse, so of course I updated the drivers, updated the bios, updated Windows, etc. Eventually I concluded it was a hardware issue, so I started stripping it down, removing all nonessentials. A couple months into debugging the issue, the GPU gives up the ghost. Okay, bad GPU, RMA it and it's all fixed, right? Wrong. Ultimately, I've narrowed it down either a super stealthy and super bizarre malfunction in the PSU that only causes problems when the 7th and 8th pins are connected on the power cables, OR... the bios is badly written and is auto detecting the PCI4 GPU *despite* the PCI3 riser cable. I've replaced the PSU and all of its cables, and I can force the bios to run at PCI3, which will almost certainly solve the problem. But I'll never know which one it was because trying to find out could kill my refurbished GPU. Of course, there is also the possibility it is neither of these things and the problem will rear its ugly head again as soon as I reinstall the GPU. It is extremely frustrating, to say the least. But in the mean time I get to read about how badly all these PC game ports are going for people and I'm wondering why I ever decided to bother with any of this. Nevermind the expense.

 

[kmbear]

I'm not crazy, am I? Tom's Guide used to be a good site, right? It wasn't always fearmongering baitclick articles, was it? Don't even get me started on the numerous notifications from the site that read "This is bad!"

 

[Ynsignia]

Wow. You said you've been building for 20 years? Yet you can't troubleshoot a simple problem? I've been building my PC for less than 5 years and I've been leaping from parts to parts already for minor upgrades - mobo to mobo, cpu to cpu, gpu to gpu, psu to psu, cooler to cooler... yet my rig runs perfectly. I've encountered problems after each upgrade, yeah, but I have fixed it. I even recently encountered where I messed up my BIOS where it doesn't boot up anymore. Had to flash it. Flashing BIOS is so freakin easy. And your problem probably just needs you to direct your boot priority to your freakin drive. That sh*t's so easy you sound like a noob. And now you are pointing us to go "gaming laptop"? You serious? You didn't know that those are just scams? GPUs of those doesn't work on the same level as it's counterparts does on PCs. Laptops are power restricted and cooler restricted. Plus, the major cons is that YOU CANNOT UPGRADE ITS PARTS!

 

[cmyking]

After my expensive rig broke yet again, my eyes have been newly opened to the delights of laptop gaming.

I’ve been building PCs for 20 years — trust me, buy a gaming laptop instead : Read more

I've been building PCs for quite a bit longer than you have but I can assure you it didn't take me 20 years to figure out that you don't put a new CPU into an old motherboard without first updating your bios. In most cases if not all it's probably wiser to get a new motherboard with the new CPU at the same time.

 

[Zandonus]

I'm terribly sorry, but this is a very poor attempt to sell gaming laptops. They're just not great. And the costs are insane. A PC just works for me, since I won't be trying to game on the bus or in the countryside, but if I did I'd just play Master of Orion (1993) on a potato, than fork out over a thousand credits to barely run modern Unreal engine game.

 

[weej]

After my expensive rig broke yet again, my eyes have been newly opened to the delights of laptop gaming.

I’ve been building PCs for 20 years — trust me, buy a gaming laptop instead : Read more

I was going to let this go but I haven't seen anyone mentioned this. Granted I only scanned the first two pages of responses.


But dear god, don't save important documents on your boot drive. I mean that's IT 101 folks

 

[mercster]

While I truly am sympathetic, it's likely that a comedy of errors has led to this point. You seem to be equating a gaming laptop with "pure simplicity"... which probably also would have been true of the desktop, had you not been messing with it for a few years and trying to upgrade it. The laptop feels nicer because you can't muck it up... but you are also limiting any upgrade paths.

I mean this in the nicest way possible (we've all been there), but there's a 98.7% chance you caused the problems yourself. Of course, these upgrade issues and BIOS bugs and whatnot are not easy to foresee, and everyone's probably run into them. But I would modify your thesis from "Gaming laptops are so much better than gaming PCs" to "I like gaming laptops, because handling PC upgrades and problems is too complicated, error-prone, laborious for me."

 

[Nazosan]

I’ve been building PCs for 20 years — trust me, buy a gaming laptop instead​

What a ridiculous hot take. First of all, essentially an appeal to authority. Fine, I'll follow with a similar one. I've been building PCs for closer to 30 years -- trust me, build a gaming desktop instead.

Laptops cost about 2x for the closest equivalent hardware -- sometimes even 3x (especially with bad brands like Alienware -- seriously, what, you recommend an Alienware???) That closest equivalent hardware typically has to lose a fair bit of capabilities to work in a laptop (this is just the physical nature of that it must use exponentially less power to not explode the battery and set your house on fire. You can't push 200+ watts through a tiny battery even as powerful as modern lithium ion batteries are.) The power supplies are much dinkier and get pushed hard when actually gaming yet still cost a pretty penny (despite being roughly equivalent to the cheapest, lowest end PC power supply.) Heat dissipation is a MAJOR issue in pretty much every design for the very obvious reasons that there just can't be much actual airflow in such a tiny space (and the fact it's tiny in the first place also means the fans must be smaller and run at really high RPMs to achieve any airflow at all.)

But that's not even the most important factor: laptops just are not meant for upgrading. There have been attempts at various improvements to modularity and such, but they'll just never match what desktops can do. With a desktop you can swap out any one part and potentially only one part. And this is key for gaming: you can always just upgrade to meet newer gaming needs, not just have to straight up replace the whole entire system if you only need, say, a new motherboard. With laptops upgrade paths are exceptionally limited. You have very limited options even in simple things that are specifically meant to be upgradeable like RAM (typically there is quite a limited range of what it will actually accept.) Most laptops (gaming or otherwise) don't even let you do things like fine tune parameters such as voltage or timings which is necessary to really have all the options. Many components are soldered in or even directly part of the board and simply can't be replaced. Then of course there are the obvious built-in components that weren't even meant to be modular in the first place. Let's see you swap out the monitor on a laptop. And what if you want a good keyboard instead of the dinky scissor-switches? Even the article write would probably surely agree that good quality mechanical switches are actually really nice and potentially even better for gaming. Or are we talking about taking a so called gaming laptop and un-laptoping it by connecting a ton of external peripherals, thus tying it down to a desk anyway? (Oh, but you kind of have to with a mouse. Trackpads are just... not for gaming...)

And this ignores what we all already know: you're best off building a system, not buying a pre-made. You can't really do that with a laptop.


Actually, I would argue that an article like that is actually actively harmful to the market. There are a lot of people who actually don't know any better and when you say "I've been building PCs for 20 years and say you should do this" they actually take it as an expert opinion. What's more, since it ultimately costs quite a lot of extra money which some can't necessarily afford and then when it comes back to bite them that they need the options that would be easily available if they had a desktop they find out they are stuck with buying a whole new overpriced system instead. I would even argue a pre-built system -- as limiting as they tend to be -- still is less limiting than a laptop (gaming or otherwise,) though of course the custom casing, riser boards, modified PSUs, etc etc are still terrible and should be avoided.

 

[nicspits]

I remember changing my oil once, I don't know what went wrong but the oil spilled everywhere and you can't drive a car without oil so I put Uber on my phone and it's fine... Oh and I've been a mechanic for 20 years... That's what this guy sounds like.

Just a few weeks ago a coworker of mine upgraded from a Ryzen 3 2600 to a 5700x... Took him 3 hours to figure out he needed to do incremental bios updates (he had already learned he needed to do a bios update just not that he couldn't go straight to the latest). This was on his prebuilt... he also upgraded his stock HSF to an assassin and his 2080 to a 4060. The rest went off without a hitch.

I hope this article is satire because working at Tom's, not being able to ask or even research what you're wanting to do, how to do it, or for f sake the resolution?!?! Is this going to be on reddit as tdifu bc he got fired for undermining the credibility of the business?

Revise your bio to - I once built a crappy computer, some years later built one (I'm doubting this assumption) with almost the latest parts, but I think I broke it with an upgrade because I can't read anywhere near as well as I write. And I have a husky.

The comments here speak for themselves and are left by an audience who obviously cares more about learning about tech than the author, and that's unfortunate for everyone.

 

[SamHammich]

Created an account just to go "what?!"

So if this article was to drive engagement at the expense of your dignity as a 'tech' enthusiast then mission accomplished I guess.

I've been building PCs for 20 years too since my teens & a major reason I started was specifically from having laptops fail on me. From overheating to poor battery life making them functionally just more portable desktops, to all the points of failure such as display connections going through weak hinges, to the pitiful amount of I/O having to daisy-chain USB hubs. And at least in those days laptops could be more easily repaired with components more accessible. These days you have every component on a board glued or soldered on to the point where you often can't even upgrade/replace your SSD or RAM if you wanted to.

Compared to 20 years ago, desktop PC building is a walk in the park. You have endless amounts of configurations to whatever your requirements are, procurement and price checking is a far simpler process. You have a huge amount of component standardisation & interoperability with adapters, component build quality is far better than it ever was if you buy anything above the bare minimum. Every decent component comes with documentation available on the manufacturer's product page describing dimensions & tolerances. Your OS downloads and installs your drivers for you during setup.

There are plenty of great use cases for laptops. If your lifestyle, home environment, or job means a static home desk setup is just not a practical arrangement for you. If you do a lot of travelling & need to be able to do what you do anywhere. If you're living with space constraints where every little bit of space counts & being able to fold away your computer & have it just occupy a small amount of space on a shelf or something makes your living arrangement more comfortable & practical, if you can't trust that people won't break in and steal your things while you're out .etc

What doesn't make a laptop a good choice is what sounds like a lack of physical coordination, inattention to detail or sheer ineptitude. You can still buy a desktop prebuilt with all the 'benefits' the post outlines or having all of the thinking done for you. Many PC hardware stores will happily assemble & set up your PC with components of your choosing & their own guarantee, for a price.

And at least with a desktop if a component fails, you won't need to RMA the whole thing & be without a PC for god knows how long. You won't have to suffer the loss of irretrievable data because the manufacturer soldered the SSD a motherboard which failed. Think your boot drive issue is bad now, try the exact same thing occurring in a laptop where you can't do your own diagnosis & repair even if you wanted to. What you've said just makes no sense at all whatsoever.

 

[SamHammich]

I'm agree with some of your point, building PC today is not as easy as the old days where everything almost really plug and play, today's there are so many factors that easily not compatible each other. For example you cannot just plug in NVME to any motherboard that have M2 slot. It's not that enjoyable anymore to build PC. I have to read many many article about the parts, there are so many catchs. I once spent almost two days to troubleshoot why the new built PC is not even boot up. Juggling to swap almost every part of it.
On the other hand gaming laptop is not comfortable at all, it's bulky, heavy, hot,and not repairable.

I don't understand your point with this. What example are you talking about? If you swap drives around between connectors then you'll be messing with the boot sequence of your bios but this was just as much the case with SATA drives. Windows does a pretty good job of downloading & installing component drivers for you on first setup, it's much more plug & play than I remember the process being back in 2002 where even just setting up the OS, drivers & basic programs from a drive formatting was usually going to take me an entire afternoon with a spindle of CDs.

Virtually all NVME SSD drives on the market are type M slots with 2280 form factor & you need to have a special use case & consciously go out of your way, usually finding a worse performing product for a higher price, to deviate from this standard. They're backwards-compatible across PCI-E standards so they 'are' going to function. Maybe you'll need to read a spec sheet of your motherboard before you commit to buying it to get the most out of your SSD - just like you would any other component.

I understand information overload can be overwhelming, but PC building is far simpler now than it ever has been. There's an 'abundance' of information out there, but it doesn't mean you need to absorb all of it. There are plenty of well-balanced build guides down to specific & widely available components that give detailed video tutorials of all of the steps, while back in the day you had to trawl a handful of loosely applicable articles & forum posts, check your parts manuals and hope it all worked out.

 

[SamHammich]

I ran a Twitch gaming channel on a 2022 gaming laptop with three displays, two cameras, and associated audio equipment. Rarely could it not handle streaming and maintain frame rates. When I travel I just pull it out of the setup and take it on the road. If you have an inherent bias against gaming laptops based on the past, you should take a look again.

My 'inherent bias' against gaming laptops is that every one I've ever owned, and every one I've since known others to own, has inevitably suffered from issues inherent to the form factor.

Slim size meaning overheating & throttling from poor ventilation, and the CPUs will definitely be clocked significantly lower.
Batteries not being sufficient for more than a short mobile play session & losing significant capacity within a couple of years, so being more of a portable desktop than a truly mobile platform in practice.
The mechanical points of failure that are the hinges which are usually made of plastic & don't seem to have tolerances for years of use from users such as students who open & close their laptops many times per day & carry them around in a backpack, particularly if the display connector doesn't have the tolerances for that repeated bending & tension which many models seem not to.
The pitiful amount of I/O which becomes an issue if you want to simultaneously use more than a small handful of accessories without daisy chaining with a USB hub.
If a single component fails, instead of being able to just replace it, you often have to RMA the whole thing

And the issues that have gotten 'worse' over time such as RAM & drives or even batteries being soldered or glued on so you couldn't replace these parts if you wanted to, and couldn't retrieve your data if a single other component on the board fails without taking it to a specialist.

Laptops absolutely have their advantages, from portability, space saving, and power efficiency. For a lot of use cases, you can get by just fine using bluetooth, a docking station or thunderbolt/USB4 hub can compensate for all the I/O you'd otherwise be missing from a desktop & many programs really aren't that process-intensive. The SteamDeck & its competitors are also a good example of the advantages of a laptop taken even further as a mobile entertainment device. But you can hardly ignore all the real disadvantages as blind 'hater' talk. Laptops are much easier to love than desktops, they're sleek & convenient, people don't just opt for relatively bulky desktops for no reason.

 

[Sam Bridges]

I’ve been building custom PCs since the 90s. I find it fun and relaxing. We use them for fun and work. I generally have little trouble with them but I almost never go bleeding edge I prefer tried and well known. I also ain’t using no Windows. No sir. Crazy huh?

Anyway, I’m not against laptops, as a matter of fact my daily nowadays is a MBP, but gaming laptop I find bloated and barely portable. But whatever floats your boat mate!

Cheers 🍻!

 

[whatthefdidido]

Oh come on. Surely you know that if you install a new bios update, your bios settings revert to default settings wiping out any changes you have made? Your SSD might be playing up as it may use some older settings or it might not be nvme standard? I know when I changed from a SATA ssd to an nvme SSD I had to change a bios setting for it to work

Who in the industry uses a pc for work and yet fails to back up anything before making a major change to the system? That's almost criminal.

Btw some motherboards allow you to update the bios via a USB slot/dongle without your cpu being compatible, or aren't you aware of this?

However I suspect that this is a ploy simply to sell more laptops as you would need a newish MB for the latest CPU

 

[Fantasillion]

So....been building pcs for 20 years and your take away is that desktop pcs suck and everyone should get a gaming laptop instead?
- I feel a more accurate statement is that you're fed up with how much stuff you need to investigate in order to be properly informed so as to complete the upgrade without issues - because there are a lot of things to be aware of because everything is muddled right now. But let me tell you, swapping CPU's without doing a Windows re-install is something that just wasn't possible back when I first started building and for a lot of years everything was just as muddled -if not more - than it is today. I'm pretty sure that it actually was the same when you started out too. It was not recommended to swap hardware without re-installs specifically because of the amount of conflicts in the OS. It has never been recommended yet you did it anyway.

You've grown accustomed to software working automatically for you because yes, in recent years it has been possible to swap hardware without a re-install. But you've taken it so far as to not even bother with a backup. And to finalize, you don't express knowledge of being able to take out your storage drive and put it in an external chassis and then plug that in to a USB port on another PC and then backup to wherever you want. It feels like reading a rant rather than someone used to using tech, working through the problems. I feel like you are perhaps not very technical - or you think of yourself as being tech savvy - but you're out of your league on this one because expecting everything to be the way it used to be - and seeing as you work for Tom's if this is supposed to be the level of expertise of the rest of the Tom's websites, I'm not sure I want to go here for advice anymore. It makes the rest of this place look bad. And also, now I really don't want to buy a gaming laptop.

 

[IamDom]

I came here to tell you the problem isn't PC's, it's you.

But looks like everyone has done that for me.

Gl with your laptop

 

[Eclecticism]

EVERYTHING YOU SAID IS WRONG.

Weird how you've done this for "20 years" and can tell people "buy a gaming laptop instead". from reading this article you clearly need to reinstall windows on your BOOT DRIVE, if you use your pc for work, have 20 years experience, and dont think to back up your work once in a while, you should have known better.. it's in the errors name dude.. I only have 4 years experience. I bought a gaming laptop in 2021 after building my first gaming desktop in 2020= 4770/2060 desktop. To a Razer 10i7/3070 laptop.. If anything happen to a laptop you have to throw away the whole thing wasting $2000+ and laptop gpus use only a percentage of the same wattage when it works. My 3070 only has 1/4 the power of a desktop 3070. I paid more and got less out of a laptop, laptops are for lazy folk who dont care about power or longevity, once its out dated, its a paper weight. I also can't clean out the internal dust in my laptop unless I completely take it apart. I since "upgraded" to a desktop I built again, 11 series i5 and a 2080 super gpu, 32gb@3200hz. My drive did the same thing yours did, I reinstalled windows on my m.2 and it's now back perfect. You wrote a whole article show all of us who know what we're doing, that you didn't know what you were doing. Today's computers are easier to put together than Legos. This same exact problem can happen on a laptop harddrive. It's a HARDDRIVE issue. Laptop and desktop both use them. I think you ment you have 20 years experience gaming on computers, because if you've spent 20 years installing windows, and actually putting them together regularly this article wouldnt exist over a harddrive error nor would you be suggesting a underpowered and overpriced gaming laptop to everyone.

 

[Eclecticism]

So....been building pcs for 20 years and your take away is that desktop pcs suck and everyone should get a gaming laptop instead?
- I feel a more accurate statement is that you're fed up with how much stuff you need to investigate in order to be properly informed so as to complete the upgrade without issues - because there are a lot of things to be aware of because everything is muddled right now. But let me tell you, swapping CPU's without doing a Windows re-install is something that just wasn't possible back when I first started building and for a lot of years everything was just as muddled -if not more - than it is today. I'm pretty sure that it actually was the same when you started out too. It was not recommended to swap hardware without re-installs specifically because of the amount of conflicts in the OS. It has never been recommended yet you did it anyway.

You've grown accustomed to software working automatically for you because yes, in recent years it has been possible to swap hardware without a re-install. But you've taken it so far as to not even bother with a backup. And to finalize, you don't express knowledge of being able to take out your storage drive and put it in an external chassis and then plug that in to a USB port on another PC and then backup to wherever you want. It feels like reading a rant rather than someone used to using tech, working through the problems. I feel like you are perhaps not very technical - or you think of yourself as being tech savvy - but you're out of your league on this one because expecting everything to be the way it used to be - and seeing as you work for Tom's if this is supposed to be the level of expertise of the rest of the Tom's websites, I'm not sure I want to go here for advice anymore. It makes the rest of this place look bad. And also, now I really don't want to buy a gaming laptop.

This is exactly what I said. Dude clearly has 20 years gaming on pcs and not 20 years of regular experience building them as hes trying to make it sound like to us. He fakes experience to push people to get underpowered and over priced laptops.

 

[Skill_Issue]

Skill issue